


A Word Before You Sleep

by ABookAndACoffee



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Epistolary, F/M, Post-ACOFAS, like literally what else do I tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 16:44:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18855007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABookAndACoffee/pseuds/ABookAndACoffee
Summary: Cassian and Nesta are existing tenuously side by side in the Illyrian camps when Nesta finds a stack of letters addressed to her that he never sent.





	A Word Before You Sleep

Illyrian males rarely suffered from illness, but Nesta cursed the Cauldron that put her in the path of a one who should suffer so thoroughly due to his own stubbornness.   
  
After days of hiding a cough and pretending that his allergies were oddly unseasonable this year, Cassian had nearly passed out on a training field. Straggling to the cabin he shared with Nesta, he had collapsed onto his bed, muddy shoes and all.  
  
Nesta hadn’t bothered to say she told him so. Instead, the moment he stepped a foot indoors she had pointed to the stairway leading to his bedroom, and gone to prepare food and medicines. She wasn’t adept at dealing with sickness, either as a mortal or as, well, whatever she was now. But she did know men when they fell ill, and that Cassian’s aggressive dedication towards routing out the rebellion in the camps would have pushed him nearly to a breaking point.   
  
They barely spoke to one another on a normal day. Nesta’s rage was clamped down to the point that at any moment, she knew her anger at her exile might come bubbling up in unexpected ways, and she would make Cassian so very, very sorry that he had ever thought to be her keeper.  
  
The problem was, Nesta had nowhere else to go. She had money that her father had left, enough to make it to the continent and then find work to sustain her, but what would it have been for? She couldn’t very well work amongst humans who would shun her, and she had no interest in learning about other fae cultures. Dreams of a legitimate business in trade had been dashed, and so she was stuck in the Illyrian steppes, surrounded by males who had no use for her other than bedding, and another who was so tense with not caring, that it was all she could do to make it through the day.   
  
The cabin they stayed at in the Illyrian camp was a palace compared to where she had lived during her family’s poverty, and thanks to Cassian, it managed to stay cleaner than her townhome in Velaris. The stark lack of liquor bottles had caused a panic in her chest when they arrived, to be in such close proximity to Cassian without any sort of buffer. Nesta reassured herself that she would be able to handle quiet evenings sitting across a dinner table from him, but it would have been lovely to have a drink in hand to soften the silence.  
  
But eventually, the routine of work and training and trying to make herself useful had become such a strain that she fell into bed each evening exhausted to her core, and Nesta counted it as a win. It didn’t matter that she had no access to her newly-found vices; she wouldn’t be caught drinking the swill the Illyrians brewed in their tiny kitchens, nor would she find herself in their beds, and so she was coping just fine without the blur that alcohol and sex had lent her life in Velaris.   
  
Seeing the world with sober clarity was nothing new, and Nesta resigned herself to again experiencing life in deafening, blinding detail that threatened to pierce her carefully-constructed shields.   
  
In their small, sparsely-stocked kitchen, Nesta warmed broth and placed it on a plate with bread. Walking up the stairs, her footfalls were heavy, slow. She knew that Feyre had done something similar for Rhys, once upon a time. There could be no mistaking Nesta’s intentions in bringing Cassian a meal, however. Not when most of the words they spoke to each other were lacking in patience at best. And since Cassian wrote weekly letters to Feyre outlining her progress, Nesta didn’t want to do anything that might provoke her overbearing younger sister to swoop in with brows furrowed in concern.  
  
Nesta placed the food by Cassian’s bedside. “Next time I suggest you rest, you should do so, Cassian.” She turned to leave but Cassian called her name. Stopping in the doorway Nesta turned, bracing herself against it.   
  
“Tell Devlon,” Cassian began, but Nesta put a hand up.  
  
“No. I’m not your messenger, and if you want to tell him something, you’ll need to do so yourself.”   
  
“But I can’t get out of bed,” Cassian protested. A sweat had broken out on his brow, but he had pulled his blankets up to his chin. Nesta was in for a long haul of playing the nursemaid, it appeared.  
  
Nesta raised an eyebrow. “Then they will have to go without your instructions for now. I’m sure the world will continue to turn even without your guidance and wisdom.” There was perhaps less bite in her words than there would have been normally, a concession to the illness of her conversation partner.   
  
“Bring me something then, would you?” It nearly sounded like an order until he remembered to tack on that ending, to raise his voice to indicate a question. On the battlefield Cassian was the general, feet spread and hands firmly wrapped around a weapon, siphons blazing, but with Nesta he was on uneven ground.   
  
Nesta waited.   
  
“A pen, and paper? It should all be on my desk, downstairs in my office.” Cassian lifted a hand to cover his sneeze, and his eyes watered as he held it in.  
  
“Fine, but I’m not going to deliver it to anyone for you,” Nesta said. “So whatever you’re writing, I hope you include personal reflections on how you should listen to women when they tell you take. It. Easy.”  
  
Cassian began to laugh, but a cough wracked his body. When he recovered, he nodded Nesta away. “I’ve told Devlon to send someone to check on me, so don’t worry. You won’t be pressed into service.”  
  
Nesta turned and left Cassian alone, heading down the stairs to where Cassian spent most of his evenings. His office was orderly, and she had no problem finding his quill and a pot of ink. However, every drawer in the writing table turned out to be devoid of writing paper. Sighing, Nesta turned and surveyed the rest of the room.   
  
Pushed against a far wall was a trunk, one that Cassian had had sent with them from Velaris. Chances were that it was full of weapons, but given that there was little other storage in the room, Nesta crossed to the trunk in a few swift strides.  
  
Nesta’s skirts swished as she knelt down to prise open the trunk. Digging through the blankets, setting aside a few swords that didn’t belong there, Nesta spied the corner of a stack of paper. Moving aside the pillow that rested on it, she discovered that it was not only was there a stack of paper but underneath she found letters, several of them, tied together with twine.   
  
Nesta sat back on her heels, setting the paper on the floor and holding the letters between her fingers as if they might burn her. The top letter was addressed to her, and as she bent back the corners of each, she quickly realized that all of them were intended for her, penned in Cassian’s small, efficient script. Or were they? They had never been sent, and so what did it mean, for Cassian to have written her?   
  
Flushing at the implications of such a personal correspondence that she had never taken part in, Nesta tapped the edge of the envelopes, debating what she should do with the letters.   
  
Clutching them to her chest, Nesta stood and shut the trunk lid quietly.   
  
Nesta, too, contained words and messages that she had never communicated to Cassian. Every word she would have sent him was seared into her brain from the sheer force of will it had taken for her to commit them to paper, even knowing they would never be read. And indeed, she had thought about sending him letters, so often in fact that it was little work to find a fragment in the reaches of her brain of what she had wanted to say to Cassian after he had pledged to protect her.   
  
Nesta was full of words she had formed after being Made, words from before they went into battle with the King of Hybern, regrets and promises she had wanted to share afterward, when they had made those pledges on the edge of death when it seemed like they wouldn’t have to live up to them.   
  
Cassian called for Nesta, and she shouted that she was on her way. Tucking the letters into a pocket in her skirts, she gathered the items Cassian had asked for and took the stairs up two at a time.  
  
Entering his room, Nesta glanced up long enough to see that Cassian had nearly finished the food she had brought him. She set the quill, paper, and ink on the bedside table and tried to leave without a word. When Cassian thanked her she merely lifted a hand in acknowledgement, the weight of the letters pressing against her leg reminding her that she needed to leave his presence as soon as possible. Surely he would hear the rustle of smuggled letters and know that she had found more than what he had sent her into his office for.   
  
As Cassian called out thanks, Nesta slipped from his room.  
  
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Nesta to spend time alone in her own bedroom, so she made her way across the hall and shut the door behind her, loosing a breath she hadn’t been able to release while standing near Cassian. She pulled the letters out of her pocket and untied the twine. Sitting on her bed, she shuffled through them. They didn’t seem to be in any order, and she set them on the bed with a groan.   
  
Nothing Cassian could have said in the letters would be something she’d want to know, surely. And yet they taunted her, with the creases and splotches of ink, the way that Cassian wrote her name with care on each envelope. The first letter opened with a crinkle, and she glanced at the door as if that noise were enough to alert Cassian that she had discovered his secret.  
  
Taking a deep breath, Nesta began to read. The letter she had chosen was dated mere weeks after the war against Hybern had ended, making it nearly six months old.   
  
_Nesta,_  
  
 _I’m not sure why I continue writing to you, knowing that I would never want to intrude on your solitude long enough for you to read these letters._  
  
Nesta paused, pressed the paper to her chest, and then glanced at the doorway. No one could sneak up on her, not now with her preternatural hearing, the way her skin tingled at the slightest disturbance in the air, but someone knowing that Cassian had written to her in such a personal manner would have been worse than someone walking in on her naked.   
  
Sure that she was alone, Nesta looked back down at the letter.  
  
 _I’ve watched you for months now, growing and coming into your own, even as you didn’t realize the extent of your own strength. That you have endured the Cauldron should have been enough. But not even Velaris and your new family could soothe your wounds, and I would have done so, had you allowed it._  
  
 _If I have learned anything about you in these past months, it is that you will never admit defeat, and so I wonder if the day will ever come when you rest your head against my chest, if you will ever allow your shoulders to lose their tension from holding up the weight of a lifetime. You remind me of myself, years ago. Before I met Rhys, and Mor, and understood the complicated sort of love that comes from having a heart that burns so brightly that it refuses to be extinguished. I saw it in you the moment we met, and I had hoped you would grace me with even a moment of that fire. But on the battlefield-_  
  
Nesta set the letter at her side, clenching it in her fist on the way. She had tried so hard in the year following the war to obliterate it from her memory. In her dreams she smelled blood and heard the screams of the dying, and in her waking hours the shadows of the dead followed her steps. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.  
  
Feyre had been willing to wreck herself for love. She spent loveless afternoons in that barn with Isaac, and then she had suffered and died, then nearly wasted away in her pursuit of Tamlin.    
  
Nesta refused to let another person make her feel the same. Elain may have been able to look at love with rose-colored glasses, but Nesta knew the truth. Love would break her, she was sure of it. Love had made her cover another’s body with her own. Love had made her willing to give up pieces of herself, blurred the lines between who she knew she was and who she might be.  
  
So whatever Cassian had said in this letter, she could handle it. Smoothing the paper, Nesta continued reading.  
  
 _But on the battlefield, I was glad at the thought of spending my last moment with you. It was the end of the world, and I knew that you were safe - not because I had saved you, but because I knew you could save yourself. I knew that my mate would live on and be strong, and find someone else to love with her entire heart._  
  
Nesta blinked away a tear before it had a chance to slide down her cheek. Of all the love letters in all the world, Nesta would have wanted any other than one that tied her irrevocably to its sender. Mate. It was such a permanent word.   
  
Nesta could feel the movement of the earth, hear the sun rising in the morning, and so when she knew that Cassian was flying over Velaris or that he’d had a nightmare, she assumed that it was just another in a long line of connections to the world she didn’t want, and hadn’t asked for. She’d felt a tie to Cassian since she’d been Made, more than she had to anyone else, even her sisters. It was knowledge she easily dismissed, given the uncertain nature of her power.  
  
In the room down the hall, Cassian shifted to his side, and a moment later Nesta could hear his deep, even breathing.   
  
Glancing at the letters, Nesta hurriedly opened another, this one written before the war had begun in earnest, when Feyre was still at the Spring Court and Nesta was newly Made and surrounded by Illyrians, trying to keep Elain from breaking entirely.  
  
 _Nesta,_  
  
 _I have never written a letter like this before, and I likely wouldn’t have but for the fact that you continue to slam your door in my face, and I’m afraid that Rhys will start making fun of the odd shape my nose is taking. He means well, but I’m not entirely comfortable talking to anyone else about this subject. A subject I am afraid that you know too well. Surely you have felt it also - the pull between us?_  
  
Setting the letter on the bed without finishing it, Nesta stood and crossed the room to her own desk, finding a hidden compartment. She pressed a button and it sprang open. A stack of letters were nestled in the back, wrapped in twine, with Cassian’s name on the front. She fingered them for a moment before pulling them out and holding them over the fire in her room. Frowning, she pulled them back to her chest.   
  
It wouldn’t matter if she destroyed the evidence or not. She would always know what she had written. And now she would always know that in his own way, Cassian had answered her.   
  
Settling back onto her bed, Nesta reached a hand underneath the mattress. A bottle of liquor waited there for her, in case of an emergency. This must surely count, if nothing else these recent months had. Nesta took a long drink, grimacing from the burn in her throat before she took another, and then another. The world began to take on blurred edges, and she picked up the letter she had abandoned. Nesta continued reading, every word Cassian had written a word that she had answered, or one that she had responded to in her own way.   
  
Down the hall, Cassian slept in the peaceful assumption that Nesta would only know what he wanted to say to her when he was ready to make the words known.  
  
In her bedroom, Nesta read the words that she had replied to, answering questions she had long been afraid to ask.


End file.
